


Godspeed

by vice_vereesa



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Banter, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25406902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vice_vereesa/pseuds/vice_vereesa
Summary: Sense of purpose comes and goes for Andromache of Scythia as she tries to punch her mortality into a shape that resembles happiness.Or:Andy struggles with her new-found mortality and her role in the team and Nile offers to help her by annoying her. If she ends up making her laugh, that's a plus.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Nile Freeman
Comments: 42
Kudos: 224





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kshaar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kshaar/gifts).



> Hey guys!  
> I watched The Old Guard yesterday, I bought the comics today, I have feelings about it that I wanted to write out of myself and my good friend Kshaar motivated me to actually do so.  
> This is a slice of life story that focuses on character development.  
> Characters are based on both the movie and the comic books, I mixed things up a bit.
> 
> Title from the Frank Ocean song.  
> Warnings: memes and references to pop-culture, I'm so sorry
> 
> Eventual Andy/Nile with background Joe/Nicky and past Andy/Quynh

They had been renting their place in Prague for a few months then – maybe two, maybe three, Andy had lost count somewhere around the second week and never bothered to go find it again. It didn’t matter, they were biding their time until Copley gathered enough intel for them to take down a human trafficking ring that spread through the entire former Eastern Bloc. 

Well, not the whole ring, not at first. They were only a group of four, after all. She had used to count as maybe two, maybe three, now she was half a person as far as battlefield-usefulness went, perhaps even a hindrance on a bad day, and she would’ve been lying if she said she wasn’t at least moderately bothered by that fact. She was very, _very_ bothered.

Nicky was, of course, very nice about everything because someone had to offset Joe and his jokes that were meant to elevate the mood but often left Andy with a bad taste in her mouth. Sometimes, she didn’t want to get the joke. He seemed like he wanted to fill the empty space that Booker left with his own brand of humour but he was just way too well-adjusted to come any close to the sarcasm and cynicism that had rolled off of Booker with natural ease. Andy thought that was just as well. It didn’t make her miss him any less, though.

Every now and then she contemplated bringing him up again, pushing the boys to reconsider on those one hundred years. It was ridiculous, in the grand scheme of things – she had lived for sixty times more than that and it should’ve been a blink of an eye. It would’ve been a blink of an eye in any other era but _now_? She thought this planet might burn up in an inferno before she had a chance to see Booker again. 

That idea unnerved her. Her sentimentality also unnerved her. She should’ve been absolutely furious at him and yet. And yet.

What didn’t set her nerves on fire was Nile, who didn’t want to make her feel good or _nice_ , or if she did, she was very subtle about it. Instead, she set out to annoy her out of her funk and it was almost working.

“Hey, Andy,” Nile said. She was dangling her feet off the armrest of the couch, stretched out with great precision to take up as much space as she could, scrolling on her tablet (no cell, only WiFi, bought using one of their many throwaway identities), periodically raising her hands to show Andy so-called “relatable pictures” that were supposed to be funny but Andy found nothing relatable or funny about them. “Lascaux caves?”

“What about them?” Andy said, refusing to look up from her book ( _À la recherche du temps perdu,_ because Joe thought he was being very funny with that suggestion. If only he hadn’t suggested that one already back in 1956 and 1996), lest she saw another unfunny, unrelatable picture.

“I just think they are neat,” Nile said. “Thank you for your contribution to art history.”

“You’re welcome,” Andy said because Nile loved that running gag and she was probably masochistic or otherwise sick in the head because she enjoyed the feeling of being annoyed by Nile. “I was the one to start that corpulent animal trend. Before me, every cave painting only featured skinny horses.”

“Chonky boy,” Nile supplied and Andy got hit by cold shivers.

“No. Too far.”

“Too far?” Nile said. “Have I done it? Do you finally regret meeting me?”

“I regret _chonky boy_ ,” Andy said, punctuating the words like punches, “but you need to work harder. You can do much worse. I believe in you.”

“That means a lot to me,” Nile said. “How do you feel about reality television?”

“Mostly with deep loathing.” 

“I can work with that,” Nile said with a nonchalance that suggested that she wasn’t about to ruin Andy’s positive outlook on life and humankind (as much as she had remaining). Andy was already mourning.

And then Nile smiled at her, bright and burning through her as if the walls she had built for millennia were only the pages of a book, maybe one as thick as _In Search of Lost Time,_ but ultimately just paper, thin and flammable, and she had to return that smile because otherwise something would be stuck inside her, ready to rot. 

~~~

Their operation took them to Brno, _damned Brno_ , and when Andy’s face darkened as they passed the city limit sign, Nile was already staring at her profile to inquire, silently. Andy couldn’t help the words spilling out of her about the seventeen times she had been cut down, stabbed or _eviscerated_ in Brno over the last three hundred years. The last one was one of her least favourite forms of death, perhaps even her second-to-last choice, trumped only by the Church burning her alive. That memory still prickled and singed her skin and the smoke, _fuck_ , the smoke–

Quynh should’ve been there. 

Quynh should’ve died like that too, with smoke smothering her from the inside, a single, glorious death, and from the ashes – risen anew.

“This doesn’t look like a very _stabby_ city,” Nile noted and Andy was brought back to the surface. “I would call it charming, maybe. Cute. Very European.”

“Are you talking about Brno or me?” Nicky piped up and earned himself a wet kiss from Joe. The boys were a heap on the backseat, like a litter of cats, incapable of separation even for a minute, and Andy couldn’t blame them. She would do that too if she could. 

_Quynh should’ve been there._

“Cities never look ‘stabby’, Nile,” Joe said. “That’s the trick.”

“Great,” Nile said. “I’ll just assume everything wants to kill me. Like in Australia.”

“You do that,” Nicky offered, “if you want to go insane.”

“Won’t I anyway?” Nile laughed.

Andy didn’t.

~~~

“I can’t believe this,” Andy said.

The knife sticking out of her shoulder glimmered in the sun, throwing a spot of light on Nile’s face, as Andy’s back shook with laughter.

Nile didn’t laugh.

“I got you a stab-proof vest,” she said and got the first-aid kit from the back of their car, a run-down black Volvo, unassuming but sturdy and reliable. “Why are you in Kevlar?”

“If I have to choose between getting shot,” Andy started, “and getting stabbed...I like my chances better this way.”

“But this is Brno,” Nile said and crouched down next to her, “ _Fucking_ Brno.”

Andy hummed at that and reached back to pull out the knife. Nile grabbed her wrist to stop her.

“Don’t be stupid,” Nile said. 

“It’s fine,” Andy lied and Nile must’ve caught it because she didn’t look appreciative at all. “Can you...could you stitch me up?”

There was a “please” at the end of her question that never arrived but was understood anyway and Nile gave her an infinitesimal nod. 

“Nicky and Joe don’t know much about modern medicine,” Andy said, watching Nile rummage around for povidone-iodine, tape and gauze. “They’ve never had to worry about it.”

“I’m sorry...I’ll have to use a sewing needle,” Nile told her and lifted a tangle of cord to inspect it. “And, uhhh, fishing line, I guess. We should restock this kit, ASAP.”

A sigh broke out of Andy and then it turned into a groan when Nile touched her broken skin. She swallowed back her hiss, however, before it could liberate itself from her lips. Minor victories.

“I’ll tell Nicky to get on that,” she said.

“Maybe you should do it yourself,” Nile said after a pause. “You need to learn to take care of your body.”

Andy was already opening her mouth to reply but Nile cut her off with a look and said, “Don’t even say it. I don’t mind doing this.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Sure, Jan,” Nile said and poured iodine over her. Andy hissed, for real, finally.

“Is that a meme or a vine?”

Nile fished her phone out of her back pocket and handed it to Andy as if she had any idea how to unlock it.

“Go and google it while I pull this out of you,” she said.

“This is by far the worst suggestion you’ve ever had.”

“I didn’t know you kept a tally, _boss_ ,” Nile said. “Consider me motivated.”

  
  


~~~

  
  


“I would remember dinosaurs,” Andy said over her plate of hummus, pita and an assortment of raw vegetables.

They had been in Cairo for two days, tracking down a drug mule while trying their best to blend in with the masses of tourists. Nile didn’t have to do much in terms of acting – on their first day, she had presented Andy with a list of art museums she had wanted to visit during their two-week stay. Their names didn’t fit on a single post-it. It was a very nice attempt at being annoying.

“You said it yourself: you don’t remember everything,” Nile said and dipped a piece of her flatbread into Andy’s hummus because it was apparently _better_ and that alone entitled her to infringe on Andy’s personal boundaries.

“I don’t remember irrelevant things. Like what I wore to a soirée in 1879,” Andy said. “Even if our cohabitation was somehow possible, which is just – really, do get some better jokes, _please_. There’s a balance of plausibility versus surrealism you should aim for. You’re not hitting your marks today.”

“Thank you, professor,” said Nile. “I’ll definitely listen to you because you are consistently hilarious.”

“That being said,” Andy said and ignored Nile’s snark. “I know I wouldn’t forget gigantic feathered lizards.”

“So they _did_ have feathers,” Nile mumbled around her mouthful of pita. “Thanks for confirming that theory.”

Andy’s burn phone went off before she could reward Nile with an eye-roll. 

_“It’s okay, we got this.”_

“Joe.”

_“We are fine, boss. You should go to the Museum of Islamic Arts.”_

“I don’t like this.”

_“Just go to the museum. That one, you will like. I bet five-hundred pounds.”_

“A thousand and the loser has to buy me some good baklava.”

_“That means you win either way.”_

“Yes.”

Andy snapped her phone closed, then in half, and then she dropped it on the ground to put a heel to it. Nile winced at the crack. She was a Millennial child, as they put it, oddly emotionally attached to everything with a battery and Andy figured she would never truly _get_ that mentality. Or memes.

Andy wasn’t hungry anymore. She pushed her lunch towards Nile who took it with a nod and a grin; she still had that marine metabolism and the bottomless stomach that came with it. 

Joe had taken up this irritating habit of going against her orders and the worst part was that he did it all in good faith like the bleeding heart he was. Andy would’ve preferred it if he was simply questioning her authority or her leadership skills. She knew how to handle that. She might’ve even agreed with him.

But Joe was terrified for her.

She had no idea how to approach that conversation so she allowed him this transgression like she had done so the last time and the time before.

She asked for the bill and asked Nile to google the Museum of Islamic Arts.

  
  


~~~

  
  


“When exactly do you lose count?” Nile said and Andy needed a few moments to register that she was talking to her.

“Of what?” she said and closed her book, setting it aside on her nightstand next to her pistol, a glass of water and two aspirins. Migraines had taken a liking to her lately and she couldn’t decide what she disliked more: a hearty headache or getting shot through the shoulder blades with a dumdum bullet. If she told Nile this, she would’ve called her an _edgelord or_ something like that and while she didn’t exactly know what that was, she knew enough to hate the idea.

“Of your deaths.” 

Nile rolled over on their kingsize bed to look at Andy and she had a haggardness about her. It was only in her eyes and around her mouth, the purse of her lips and the frown of her brow, a dampening of her usual light, and Andy found herself swallowing _nothing_. Her throat was dry sandpaper.

“I stopped counting around a hundred,” she said eventually. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Nile said and shrugged.

“Is it starting to lose its novelty?”

“The opposite, actually,” Nile said. “Today felt like someone was dragging my ass back all the way from hell.”

“You jumped on a grenade, Nile,” Andy reminded her and she tried for a gentleness in her voice that was alien to her. “I can promise you that one won’t ever get better than that.”

It was an ugly sight too but she didn’t want to add that. Nile curled around that grenade exactly as she had been trained to do, her body swallowed up the shockwave and the heat and the fragments. Andy was thrown back like a ragdoll, she was pretty sure she was now the happy owner of some tinnitus in her left ear, but she was alive. She was alive.

“Don’t get me wrong, it was totally worth it,” Nile said. “I just wish it didn’t have to come hand-in-hand with this whole bullshit feeling of eternal damnation.”

“Booker would say,” Andy said and attempted a Booker-impression, “that we are already in purgatory.”

“Agree to disagree on that one,” Nile drawled and propped herself up. She reached over Andy and picked up her book, only to drop it back just as quickly. “Marcel Proust? You’re still reading this?”

“I’d like to savour it.”

“Just admit that you hate it.”

“I can’t,” Andy said. “I have to get to the end of it first. I might still end up liking it.”

“Maybe you really are in purgatory,” Nile said and dropped her a smile. 

Andy wanted to tell her that she too would like to “agree to disagree” but she wasn’t quite sold on that just yet.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team gets some R'n'r and Nile gets to be assertive and Andy gets to take two steps forward and only one step back.

They went out to a pub when they got back in Prague, on Andy’s suggestion of course – Joe didn’t ever drink and Nicky was partial to wine. _Good_ wine, he would specify, from either Liguria or Tuscany because he was both biased and picky and unashamed of either.

Their detour to Cairo had been a fiasco that had almost cost them both their lead on the drug cartel and Andy too, who had only very nearly avoided becoming a handsome smear of blood on a wall, not unlike one of the modern paintings Nile had forced her to peruse in the Gezira Center for Modern Art. 

Once the promise of impending death died down in her, Andy wanted to drink – _no_ , she wanted to get drunk. Not shamefully drunk, not blackout drunk, only drunk enough to kill the night away, maybe weather her first hangover in millennia, frankly, the first hangover she could remember at all and then nurse herself back to normalcy.

She was thoroughly depleted and drained and her body felt like it was collapsing inwards, and the most upsetting part of it was that she could not tell if it was the aftershock of the grenade, her body numbly trying to rearrange itself, or just her age catching up with her all at once, as though it knew it had a lot to compensate for and it felt a little embarrassed about that delay. She hoped it was the former because she wasn’t ready for the implications of the latter.

Her teammates chose to be very considerate about it and each of them faked a debilitating medical condition, acted out terribly on purpose, to make her feel better: Nicky said he had developed a dust allergy in all that sand, Joe had dislocated his shoulder (he had explained this while gesturing wildly around with both arms), and Nile said she had been suffering a reflux flare-up since she had jumped on that grenade, which Andy found genuinely hilarious even if she had to re-type “reflux” thrice into a browser search bar to get the joke.

“They call this a ‘craft beer’,” Joe said as he read the label on Nicky’s bottle. “Remember when every beer was craft beer?”

“Beer was a mistake,” Nicky said and he parted his bottle from Joe only to pass it to Nile who took it with a shrug.

“It actually was,” Andy said and the buzz in her head and behind her eyelids tickled her enough to crack a toothy grin over her face. “Spontaneous fermentation.”

“You would know. I bet you stood right there and watched that barley rot,” Nile quipped and clinked her bottle with Andy’s tall glass of Staropramen. “Cheers.”

Andy’s grin numbed down into a smile as she considered Nile and took stock of the signs: the eased-up shoulders, the relaxed grip on her bottle, the fact that she hadn’t checked their perimeters in half an hour. 

Nile was _comfortable_. 

Nile fit right in.

Andy felt lighter for it.

“Na zdravi,” she said and downed her beer in one go.

~~~

“Nice one, kid,” Andy heaved out, unthinking, her chest rising and falling, rhythmless. Nile had sent her flying to the tatami, her back hit it with a loud thud and she felt her knife wound re-open just enough to stain her white tank top. A groan of surprise and pain ripped from her lungs – it was a perfectly performed throw. She didn’t see it coming.

She was almost _proud_.

Nile looked like she had just bit into a particularly bitter grapefruit.

“I really wish you’d quit with this ‘kid’ thing,” she said and grabbed Andy’s hand to pull her up into a sitting position. “You sound like some cowboy. Like Clint Eastwood or...I don’t know.”

“I’m gonna assume that’s not very hip of me,” Andy said and pulled the shoulder strap of her tank aside to look at her scar. It was slowly seeping blood. She needed to put gauze and tape over it.

“It’s not that.” Nile shook her head and dropped down next to her. “I just don’t like it. You make it sound like you could be my mom. It’s weird.”

“I _could_ be your mom,” Andy pointed out and that was clearly a misstep because Nile rolled her eyes so hard they threatened to just pop out and roll away to greener pastures with less annoying teammates.

“Okay, _look_. Logically, I know that,” Nile said. “You have like six-thousand years on me. Can’t beat that. But you look forty, tops.”

“For now,” Andy reminded her. In all fairness, she didn’t know if she would start ageing or just suddenly crumble into dust one of those days without any warning. There was hardly any user manual for her condition.

“Sure,” Nile said. “But my point is – I’m almost thirty.”

“No way,” Joe yelped from somewhere underneath Nicky, who was practising a choking hold on him, way too light to do any real damage. “You have such a youthful _joie de vivre_ about you.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Nile said. “I have good skin.”

“You’re right,” Andy said after a moment or two. “It is patronising, even if I didn’t mean it that way.”

“You really don’t fuckin get it, do you?” Nile whispered and then laughed, short and sharp and abrupt, a painful contrast that hit Andy’s left eardrum like a slap. “It isn’t about respect.”

“What is it about, then?” Andy said. The boys were dead silent and she knew they were eavesdropping. 

Nile gave them a glance and said, “I think I’ll let you figure it out yourself.”

Andy did. There were certain things that never changed, century to century, millennium to millennium, painfully familiar always.

And then they elected to ignore that half-confession of attraction, or maybe not even that, a quarter or a confession, and they went on exactly as they had done before, except there was a layer of understanding between them, growing thicker with each day and each chance they chose to not take.

~~~

The stab wound had healed and left a white scar, surprisingly faint for something that was stitched together with a straight needle in a back alley among broken bottles of beer and cigarette butts. Andy had expected it to end up as a keloid – she could still recall the exact shape and size and colouring of the one she’d got at twelve when her sister had tried to pierce her earlobe. It had been a bloody mess and she’d had to wear the large, protruding scar, almost like a pearl, until her first death. Then her body had reworked itself completely from sinews to muscles, bones to joints, and the keloid had to go too.

She had been livid about that loss. 

Her sister had died on Andy’s fourteenth summer; she had been taken by the _plague_ , which had been their umbrella term for every ailment from the common cold to the black death, and Andy’s money was on pulmonary anthrax or tuberculosis. She couldn’t remember all the symptoms, only the coughing and her sister’s beeswax-yellow skin. 

If Nile had asked her why she remembered the scar but not her sister beyond that night with the needle and the blood, she would have nothing to offer. 

Sometimes she felt livid about that too.

~~~

Her talk with Joe was inevitable, their disagreement had been boiling and simmering and boiling yet again for weeks by then and it was threatening to finally boil over and burn through the fireplace and as much as she wasn’t the greatest fan of heart-to-hearts, she respected Joe enough to attempt a sit-down with him at a quaint little café over coffee and croissants. It was time.

They had ditched the Paris safehouse after their last visit, as sensibility dictated, and Copley had hooked them up with a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, some Russian guy who knew how to set them up in temporary rentals without asking questions. Andy assumed he was a fixer for the mafia and while those weren’t her first choice circles to run in, these were the only people in 2020 she could trust to not ask questions besides the only one that mattered: who referred you?

Even with the added comfort of their new flat (it even had two whole bedrooms and Andy was delighted to skip out on playing rock-paper-scissor with Nile to decide who gets the couch), she would have rather been anywhere else.

Andy didn’t like Paris.

No, that wasn’t it – she didn’t like now-Paris with the pigeons and the garbage and the hordes of tourists who wanted to take pictures of everything and then immediately upload it _somewhere_ because things and stuff had to be captured and put into folders and curated carefully in a collection, otherwise nothing ever truly happened. Maybe if she had had the luxury of keeping pictures, she wouldn’t have forgotten so much.

Andy understood the fascination.

She didn’t have to like it, though.

“We’ll have to ask Copley to scrub us from the internet,” Andy said and stirred her coffee – espresso, black, no sugar, she appreciated the kick of bitterness after the croissant that turned out a bit too sweet to her liking.

The café Joe had chosen for their rendezvous was an obvious rip-off of the Maison Sauvage, except a lot cheaper and a lot smaller and too far from the city centre to be considered a tourist trap. As usual, that wasn’t enough.

“Again?” Joe groaned as he dipped his sugar cookie into his cappuccino. He could only do this because Nicky wasn’t around to judge him for ruining a good cup of coffee.

“That girl has just taken a photo of her éclair,” Andy said and took a sip, “and of your profile.”

“ _Stai scherzando,”_ Joe muttered. His cookie broke in half and sank to the bottom _._ “That’s not even my good side.”

“You have one?”

“I see you are back to your humour,” Joe said and grinned at her. “I thought it popped and went with your eardrum.”

“I wanted to talk about that, actually,” Andy said and set her cup aside. “About the Cairo mission”–Andy stopped to give Joe a chance to let out a tired sigh and he lived with it–“Things went south because you decided to go off-script.”

“In Brno, we did exactly as you planned,” Joe reminded her, lowering his voice, “and you got _stabbed._ ”

“What is your point?” Andy said. “Because mine is clear: I do not want repeats of that.”

“I don’t...have a _point_ , Andy,” he said. “I’m not trying to undermine you but I’m worried about”–he inclined his head a bit and Andy knew to expect a lie–“ _tactics_. You are used to being our spearhead.”

“What else could I be?” Andy spread her arms out, palms up, and shrugged. “I can’t do research, I’m not Booker. I don’t know how to work computers, I can barely use my phone.”

“'Barely' is a generous word.”

“Don’t give me shit, we are the same,” she scoffed. “And reconnaissance calls for finesse I don’t think I have. I’ll leave that to Copley so he can feel useful too.”

“Where does that leave us?” Joe sighed and fished for his cookie-mush with a spoon.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t want to sit around while you do the work. I am not yet useless.”

“I didn’t think you were,” he said, clearly having given up on finding his cookie, as he went on to finish his cappuccino anyway. “I’d only like to see more of an adjustment. I want to learn how we can keep you safe even when someone throws a grenade at us.”

“Nile seemed eager to jump on it,” Andy said.

“And you hated it,” Joe said and Andy made a face. She couldn’t disagree. “One day she will take a bullet for you and never get up and you’ll blame yourself.”

“And I will be correct,” she said and Joe hummed in response. “Fine. Let’s talk to Copley.”

“You think he can train us?”

“Not him. Maybe a friend-of-a-friend,” Andy said and dropped a stack of bills on the table. “He seems to have many of those.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys, thank you for the support :) I hope you enjoyed this one too!


End file.
